Equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing, and similar routing schemes, are used to allow routers to load balance traffic to a destination among a plurality of network paths, potentially offering substantial increases in bandwidth over that of a single path. In some embodiments of cluster environments in which a plurality of nodes of the cluster communicate with an upstream router, it may be desirable to use ECMP routing or a similar strategy to load balance traffic to the plurality of nodes from the upstream router. In some embodiments, the plurality of nodes of the cluster may appear to the upstream router be a single node, accessible via multiple paths, and accordingly, the router may distribute traffic amongst the multiple paths. However, in many such embodiments, if a node of the cluster goes down or becomes unavailable, the upstream router may not be able to detect this condition, because it may still be properly communicating with other nodes at the same virtual or mapped IP address. Accordingly, the router may continue sending packets to the unavailable node until a timeout or expiration interval of the routing protocol expires, and the packets may be lost.